Thomson Reuters Says It’s Cutting 4% of Its Workforce

Thomson Reuters said on Tuesday it would cut about 2,000 jobs worldwide, about 4% of its workforce, and take a fourth-quarter charge of $200 million to $250 million to streamline its business.

The restructuring across 39 countries and 150 locations would mainly affect the Financial & Risk business and the Enterprise, Technology & Operations Group, the news and information company said. The company employs about 48,000 people globally, a spokesman said.

The changes come as part of its multi-year effort to streamline its businesses, said Jim Smith, chief executive, in an interview Tuesday.

“It’s about simplification and taking out bureaucracy and taking out layers all of which have added complexity and slowed us down,” he said. “These actions are not driven by any reaction to market conditions or in any way coming on the back of underperformance.”

Thomson Reuters is the parent of Reuters News, which competes for financial customers with Bloomberg LP as well as News Corp’s Dow Jones unit. There will be no decline in headcount in the Reuters newsroom, according to a memo to employees on Tuesday.

The company reported slightly lower third-quarter net earnings. Net income was $286 million or 36 cents per share, compared with $293 million or 36 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding special items, earnings were 54 cents per share. Analysts on average expected 47 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S/.

Revenue rose 1% to $2.74 billion before currency effects and was flat when they were factored in. The company reiterated its forecast of 2% to 3% revenue growth for the year.

Morningstar Loses Challenge to Thomson Reuters Coding Settlement

Back in 2012, Thomson Reuters tri struck a deal with the European Commission’s antitrust authorities over the short codes it uses to identify securities and their trading locations.

That deal has now been upheld by the EU’s highest court, marking a defeat for Thomson Reuters rival Morningstar morn, which had tried to have the settlement struck down.

The settlement was about Reuters Instruments Codes, or RICs. Following a three-year probe, the Commission found that Thomson Reuters—a company with a dominant position in the market for consolidated real-time data feeds—had been prohibiting its customers from using RICs to retrieve data from other providers’ feeds.

Those other providers (such as Morningstar, an investment research firm based in Chicago) were also unable to use RICs in their mapping tables, which would have allowed interoperability with the systems of Thomson Reuters customers.

Thomson Reuters agreed to let its customers use RICs to retrieve data from its competitors’ feeds, and also to help them map between the RICs system and its rivals’ coding systems. Satisfied that this would make it easier to switch providers, the Commission ended its case.

Morningstar challenged that decision on the basis that the settlement didn’t let competitors such as itself use Thomson Reuters’ coding system.

However, on Thursday the Court of Justice of the European Union said the settlement gave customers the benefits they needed, and that there had been no need to include Thomson Reuters’ competitors in its license terms.

It pointed out that Thomson Reuters’ customers had everything they needed for them, as well as third-party software developers, to map RICs to the competing providers’ coding systems.

“Those commitments therefore represent a genuine improvement for Thomson Reuters’ customers since, in the absence of the need extensively to modify IT applications, they do not face prohibitive costs during a possible switch of providers,” the court said.

A database used by global banks, governments, law firms, and intelligence agencies to identify suspects related to terrorism, crime, corruption, and other wrongdoings leaked online.

Chris Vickery, a security researcher at the software firm MacKeeper, recently discovered an exposed version of the Thomson Reuters’ tri World-Check database, which contains 2.2 million records on “heightened risk individuals and organizations,” he wrote Tuesday in a post on Reddit. Vickery said the copy he found dated to mid-2014.

“No hacking was involved in my acquisition of this data,” he wrote, mentioning that the set appeared to be “sourced from publicly available materials.” He added that he “would call it more of a leak than anything.”

In an email to Fortune, Vickery further clarified that the leak involved an open source Apache database called CouchDB: “It was a CouchDB instance that anyone in the world could access, as it was configured for public access. Anyone with the URL could access and review all the records.”

Vickery told Fortune that SmartKYC, a database manager that sells its services to financial firms, was likely responsible for the misconfigured database. A Thomson Reuters spokesperson declined to comment on the attribution. Fortune has reached out to SmartKYC to confirm this detail as well, and will update this post if and when we hear back.

Thomson Reuters did confirm the leak in a statement emailed to Fortune. “Thomson Reuters was yesterday alerted to out of date information from the World-Check database that had been exposed by a third party,” the company said. “We are grateful to Chris Vickery for bringing this to our attention, and immediately took steps to contact the third party responsible—as a result we can confirm that the third party has taken down the information. We have also spoken to the third party to ensure there will be no repetition of this unacceptable incident.”

People have criticized Thomson Reuters for its data collection methods, which can include state-sponsored news sources, as well as its designations, which opponents say can be inaccurate, as BBC’s Radio 4 reported last year. The company disagrees with such characterizations, maintaining that the database’s primary function is to help banks, for instance, comply with international sanctions.

For more on terrorism, watch:

Subscribers to World-Check include “over 300 government and intelligence agencies, 49 of the 50 biggest banks, pre-employment vetting agencies and 9 of the top 10 global law firms,” according to a Vice News story published earlier this year.

Vickery has built a reputation on discovering data where it shouldn’t be accessible. Most recently, he reported on the breach of 93 million Mexican voters’ records, caused by an error in a MongoDB mongodb database.

Several companies are trying to take down the Bloomberg Terminal

If you’re in finance, you know the Bloomberg Terminal. How can’t you? The dual flat-panel monitor, the throwback user interface, the distinct keyboard, the $25,000 price tag—these are the signs of an organization that’s serious about finance, whether it’s an investment bank or a publication such as Fortune.

But like any good business where competition is low and margins are high, it’s only a matter of time before someone—usually a technology company—comes in to disrupt it.

That process is underway. Several companies are diligently working to break Bloomberg’s grip on financial information, and a recent Dealbook article outlines a few of them.

There is Symphony, an upstart jointly owned by some of the world’s biggest banks (such as Goldman Sachs), which next month expects to begin offering software to replace the communications system that traders use to talk to one another. (Fortune’s Robert Hackett first profiled the company earlier this year.)

There is Money.net, a company led by a former top Bloomberg executive, Morgan Downey. It offers many similar services with a slicker UI in a less tethered format.

And of course there is Thomson Reuters, whose own 13-year-old messaging service has long been an alternative to Bloomberg’s—so much so that many financial firms acknowledged paying for both of them in the wake of the 2013 “snooping scandal” in which Bloomberg journalists were found trawling the terminal for confidential information.

There’s a lot at stake. The newer services cost a fraction—as much as one-twentieth—of Bloomberg’s Terminal, propelled by the rise of cloud computing, mobile computing, and open-source software. On the other hand, they replace only a small slice of the Bloomberg package—one that has grown to include everything from market data and documentation to messaging and news.

Will the startups take down Bloomberg? My money says no—but they will contribute to a wave that will forever change the way the incumbent does business.